Animals – Animal anxiety

In big hospitals, there are pain management teams for humans. In the veterinary field, vets have pain management skills which improve every year. Pain diagnosis, on the other hand, can be quite tricky. If we poke or prod somewhere and elicit a flinch, or see a limp, then the diagnosis of pain is relatively straightforward. However, some animals, just as some humans, internalise pain and discomfort. If pain becomes chronic, or chronically intermittent, we may see the behavioural signs of anxiety develop. This is especially so if there is a familial predilection for this, or a threshold number of pain events has occurred.

The same can be said for stressful events within the human field. After the Christchurch earthquakes, Kiwi neuroscience educator Nathan Wallace found that within a family of children, some developed anxiety after one or two earthquake events, and other siblings developed it at four or five events. This showed that these latter children had a higher threshold before signs of anxiety developed.

So, what is anxiety?

Anxiety is defined as the anticipation of a real, or perceived, negative event. Behavioural signs of anxiety include hypervigilance, hyperactivity and fear-based behaviours in the recorded behaviours of a species. When these signs are seen out of context, and occur at a constant and elevated level or interfere with normal functioning, then it is likely to become a problem to the animal, their owners and other animals they might mix with.

In a sense, we may think we can “train away” anxiety, but essentially, we cannot. We can train legs to be more still (less hyperactive) for example, but the anxiety remains until diagnosis and treatment begins.

Anxiety generally worsens if trainers think they can train it away. Often during this process, the initial (undesirable) anxiety behaviour is replaced by another undesirable behaviour, which gives a sense that we did, in fact, “train it away”. This is especially so when pain is present. We have a saying that you can’t train through the pain, and pain is indeed a common reason that training isn’t progressing as it ought to particularly within ridden horses, and even some inter-dog aggression cases I have seen.

Anxiety-related conditions are an extremely common class of disorders in companion animals, which includes horses, and make up a huge amount of patients presented to veterinary behaviour specialists.

A subset of these animals have pain and inflammation somewhere in the body that is tricky to detect because it may be hidden inside. This is why, as a GP vet, a thorough physical exam and gathering a full history of a patient is so important. Our hands, fingers and eyes are usually the single most important diagnostic tools for pain detection that a vet has in their toolbox. Resolving any pain and its underlying cause is the first step in the treatment of anxiety-related conditions.